ch, now on the grass
under a Norfolk Island pine, the companion of perhaps the lowest class
on earth, the Larrikins of Sydney. Morning after morning, the dawn
behind the lighthouse recalled him from slumber; and he would stand and
gaze upon the changing east, the fading lenses, the smokeless city, and
the many-armed and many-masted harbour growing slowly clear under his
eyes. His bed-fellows (so to call them) were less active; they lay
sprawled upon the grass and benches, the dingy men, the frowsy women,
prolonging their late repose; and Carthew wandered among the sleeping
bodies alone, and cursed the incurable stupidity of his behaviour. Day
brought a new society of nursery-maids and children, and fresh-dressed
and (I am sorry to say) tight-laced maidens, and gay people in rich
traps; upon the skirts of which Carthew and "the other blackguards"--his
own bitter phrase--skulked, and chewed grass, and looked on. Day passed,
the light died, the green and leafy precinct sparkled with lamps or lay
in shadow, and the round of the night began again, the loitering women,
the lurking men, the sudden outburst of screams, the sound of flying
feet. "You mayn't believe it," says Carthew, "but I got to that pitch
that I didn't care a hang. I have been wakened out of my sleep to hear a
woman screaming, and I have only turned upon my other side. Yes, it's a
queer place, where the dowagers and the kids walk all day, and at night
you can hear people bawling for help as if it was the Forest of Bondy,
with the lights of a great town all round, and parties spinning through
in cabs from Government House and dinner with my lord!"

It was Norris's diversion, having none other, to scrape acquaintance,
where, how, and with whom he could. Many a long dull talk he held upon
the benches or the grass; many a strange waif he came to know; many
strange things he heard, and saw some that were abominable. It was to
one of these last that he owed his deliverance from the Domain. For some
time the rain had been merciless; one night after another he had been
obliged to squander fourpence on a bed and reduce his board to the
remaining eightpence: and he sat one morning near the Macquarrie Street
entrance, hungry, for he had gone without breakfast, and wet, as he had
already been for several days, when the cries of an animal in distress
attracted his attention. Some fifty yards away, in the extreme angle of
the grass, a party of the chronically unemployed had